Maloney goes on attack in debate with primary challenger

Incumbent Rep. Carolyn Maloney defended her 13 terms in Congress and questioned the experience of her Democratic primary challenger, Suraj Patel, as the pair faced off Tuesday in the only televised debate in the race for New York’s 12th Congressional District.

Maloney is seeking reelection in a district redrawn in 2010 to encompass not only parts of Manhattan’s East Side, but also Long Island City in Queens and Greenpoint in Brooklyn. Patel, a 34-year-old hotel executive and professor, has never held elected office.

Patel criticized Maloney’s 1994 vote for then-President Bill Clinton’s crime bill, and previous approval for mandatory sentencing laws, which she has said she now regrets.

“I think that we have evolved as a nation in seeing that it hasn’t worked,” Maloney said, noting that “there were very few Democrats who voted against that bill.”

Patel pointed out that Jerry Nadler, who represents Manhattan, voted against it, and said Maloney was on the wrong side of history in her support for it.

“What have you done to help people? Besides talk?” Maloney asked.

“Not only am I an attorney, but I teach business ethics at NYU. That’s God’s work,” Patel said.

“How do you reconcile teaching ethics and what you say in your ethics class and what you do in your personal life?” Maloney asked, referring to reports in the New York Daily News about labor violations at hotels owned by his family’s company, and Patel’s claiming a “homestead” tax exemption in Indiana available to residents, while he has said during the campaign that he's been a resident of the East Village for 12 years.

The tax exemption “truly was a mistake,” Patel said, adding that he is “absolutely not” still claiming it.

The debate came the same day Patel’s campaign sent out more than 50,000 mailers across the district sharply attacking Maloney for comments about the possibility of a link between autism and vaccination, for donations she has received from businesses and corporations, and for her 2003 vote to authorize the Iraq War.

Suraj Patel for Congress

The mailers depict Maloney with anti-vaccination activist and actress Jenny McCarthy, and cite Maloney’s comments in a congressional hearing in 2012 about the potential link between vaccines and autism, a theory that is popular among anti-vaccination activists but that has been discredited by the scientific community.

At the hearing, Maloney said the debate over the link between vaccines and autism reminded her of people who dismissed tobacco smoking as a cause of cancer, and said, “You’ve got to just listen, you know, to — I remember smoking. I was on the City Council. I sat through so many hearings where they vowed smoking was not bad for your health. It’s common sense that it was bad for your health. … The same thing seems to be here with the vaccinations. There’s too much verbal evidence coming from parents where they break down [and say], ‘I had a normal child, I gave him a vaccination, and then they … came down with autism.”

Maloney's comments were excerpted on the back cover of a 2015 anti-vaccination book called “The Autistic Holocaust.”

Maloney's spokesman accused Patel's campaign of taking her quotes out of context, and pointed to her statements of support for vaccination. But she has also co-sponsored legislation in 2013 to "determine whether exposure to vaccines or vaccine components is associated with autism spectrum disorders, chronic conditions, or other neurological conditions."

“This mailer is a product of thousands of interactions with voters throughout the district — Maloney keeps asking voters to take a look at her track record, and we’re happy to help her in that task,” Patel spokeswoman Lis Smith told POLITICO.

“It’s also fascinating in light of the larger national conversation about ideological and generational primaries, and how this generation of Democratic voters is holding incumbents to account.”

Maloney’s spokesman criticized Patel as a political operator without a connection to the district.

"Patel promised a new style of politics but it turns out he's not that new — shopping for a district to run in, taking tax breaks and mortgages for houses outside the 12th district, and, now, campaigning with out-of-context quotes and negativity. It looks like he'll say or do almost anything to try and win an election," spokesman Bob Liff said in a statement to POLITICO.

Throughout the course of the short debate, which aired on NY1 and was moderated by the station’s Errol Louis, the candidates agreed with each other on several policy questions. Neither would agree to vote in favor of a North Korea denuclearization agreement if it meant withdrawing U.S. troops from the area. More locally, both demurred when asked if there should be a cap on new bars opening up in the district, saying the matter is a decision best left up to the community. Neither had ever voted for a Republican, and neither is ready to vote to impeach President Donald Trump.

There were some differences, but mostly of degree.

Patel called for defunding the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency entirely, while Maloney, who pointed out that ICE is responsible for combating sex trafficking, suggested the agency should be reformed, or dismantled and replaced with a new entity. Maloney said she’d support keeping Nancy Pelosi as House minority leader, and Patel said he’d wait to see who the candidates were. Both support legalizing marijuana, but Patel also supports retroactive expunging of criminal records related to nonviolent offenses for marijuana possession.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misrepresented a legislative action taken by Rep. Carolyn Maloney. She has co-sponsored legislation in 2013 to "determine whether exposure to vaccines or vaccine components is associated with autism spectrum disorders, chronic conditions, or other neurological conditions."